A Leader and Ender Finish!

Well, I didn't intend to take a month-plus blogging break, but it's been pretty quiet on the sewing front around here.  It's hard to resist being outside when spring finally rolls around!  However, I did finish a long-term leaders and enders quilt project a few weeks ago and I'm excited to share it today:

At some point prior to May 2018 I must have had an idea for these cream squares,* because that's when I found a large box of them in my sewing room closet.  I had no idea when or why I cut them, but there were so many of them I knew there was a project there.  I decided to use them to make a leaders and enders scrappy four-patch quilt in which each four-patch was a unique blue fabric.  All shades of blue except for solids were welcome.

Instead of digging through my scraps and stash to prep the blue blocks, I decided to only use cut-offs from the blues in projects I was already making.  It was exciting each time I realized I was using a new blue and got to make a four-patch.  After I had a large stack of blocks (helped greatly from the making of my postage stamp quilt), I started piecing them together, also as leaders and enders.  I made a point of setting the blocks randomly; I didn't worry about the direction of the directional prints or the placement of the different shades of blue.  I kept going until I didn't have enough cream squares to piece another row.  I don't normally add borders to my quilts, but I wanted this one to be a little big bigger so I used the leftover blue from my Fado Road quilt to make one - with matching cornerstones of course!

The piece of orange flannel on the back is both the only non-blue fabric in the quilt and the only piece of fabric I bought for this quilt.  It shrunk more than I expected when I washed it prior to basting, so I made it larger with the blue flannel left over from a quilt I haven't shared on here.  The binding is a half-yard cut of blue fabric that I found in my stash.  For the quilting, I took advantage of the grid shape of the quilt and went back to my old friend orange peel.  I rarely do this pattern because I'm too lazy to mark the grid, but I really enjoy both quilting it and the final effect!

And that's my quilt!  It took just shy of seven years to piece, two weeks to quilt and bind, and three weeks to photograph and blog.  You might think that this was my oldest WIP, but it's actually pretty middle of the pack: I have four WIPs that are older than this one and only six that are newer.  I think I've gotten better over time about picking projects that I know I'm going to finish, and, in fact, I've already started a new leaders and enders quilt with a goal of finishing it in less time than this one took.  But for now, I'm happy to have this quilt off the WIP list and on my couch for everyday use!

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* I'd probably call this color "tan" or "beige" now, but I've always referred to this quilt as the "Blue and Cream Leaders and Enders" quilt so that's the term I'm using.  I've tried to give it a shorter name over the years, but alas, it's stuck with this long descriptive title.